I have a NetGear SB104 setup connecting two Win98 PCs. It was fine until shutdown yesterday when popup said their was a user connected. Impossible, but I looked. Some name I had never heard of was connected. I shut down and disconnected them. Now every time I boot up, there is another foreign user name added. How can I stop the access? How cam I remove the unwanted clients? I've unchecked "file and printer sharing" but I'm sure that's not enough. Please help an old surfer reclaim his privacy. Thanks.

First of all a Netgear SB104 is a *hub*, not a firewall router. More technically it's a networking kit consisting of two FA 310TX auto speed sensing 10/100 PCI ethernet cards and a EN104TP 10BASE T ethernet hub. Hubs don't block Internet traffic. All they do is route IP packets between machines. If you want a firewall pick up ZoneAlarm (www.zonealarm.com) or Tiny Firewall or one of the other decent free firewalls and install it on both machines. Alternately, replace your hub with a firewall router such as the Netgear RP314 or the SMC 7004BR. To secure printer and file sharing use a 'strong' password, at least 9 characters long, no dictionary words, and a mixture of alpha and numeric characters. M1Y2C3A4T or something along those lines that you can remember. Use an up-to-date antivirus scanner and a dedicated trojan checker like The Cleaner to make sure you haven't been hacked. All they can do right now, hopefully, is watch you. With good firewalls they won't even be able to do that.

Firewall http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10105-108-57636.html?bt.37282.10014..dl-57636 Antivirus http://www.grisoft.com/html/us_downl.htm The Cleaner http://www.moosoft.com/download.php